To the Barricades

By Stephen Collis

In To the Barricades we move back and forth between historical and contemporary scenes of revolt, from nineteenth-century Parisian street barricades to twenty-first-century occupations and street marches, shifting along the active seam between poetry and revolution. At once elegy (poems dedicated “to” past revolutionary figures and scenes) and a call for renewed struggle in the here and now, this collection of “social lyrics” and serial explosions seeks to drive apathy from the field and to recover forgotten “radical ideas” amidst our current “amnesiac condition.” Avant-garde technique is donated to lyric ends (the expression of social affects), as Arthur Rimbaud presides and the commune is reconvened in Vancouver’s streets.

To the Barricades continues Collis’s “life” poem, “The Barricades Project,” which also includes Anarchive (2005) and The Commons (2008). Both the anti-archive of the revolutionary record and the dream of a once and future “commons” upon which all can equally dwell continue to shape these poems where words are hurried bricks thrown up as “barricades” in language.

“Dear effects of / tireless treason / the social only / shuffles if you / move your feet / we’ve learned this / in a place invaders / called Vancouver / even if we are only / a few and even if / it rains on the day / of the demo”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Talonbooks
• Release date: Apr 15, 2012
• ISBN: 9780889227484

Stephen Collis

Stephen Collis is the author of seven books of poetry, including the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize–winning On the Material (Talonbooks, 2010). Other titles include Anarchive (New Star, 2005, also nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize), The Commons (Talonbooks, 2008, 2014), To the Barricades (Talonbooks, 2013), Decomp (co-authored with Jordan Scott, Coach House, 2013), Once in Blockadia (Talonbooks, 2016), and A History of the Theories of Rain (Talonbooks, 2021), nominated for a Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry. An activist and social critic, his writing on the Occupy movement is collected in Dispatches from the Occupation (Talonbooks, 2012). Collis is also the author of two book-length studies, Phyllis Webb and the Common Good (Talonbooks, 2007) and Through Words of Others: Susan Howe and Anarcho-Scholasticism (ELS Editions, 2006), as well as the editor, with Graham Lyons, of Reading Duncan Reading: Robert Duncan and the Poetics of Derivation (Iowa University Press, 2012). His memoir, Almost Islands: Phyllis Webb and the Pursuit of the Unwritten, was published by Talonbooks in 2018. He teaches contemporary poetry and poetics at Simon Fraser University. Collis was the 2019 recipient of the Latner Writers’ Trust Poetry Prize, which is given to a mid-career poet in recognition of a remarkable body of work, and in anticipation of future contributions to Canadian poetry.

Book preview

To The Barricades

STEPHEN COLLIS

Talonbooks

Contents

Cover

Dear Common

Dear Common: Vancouver Alights

Kettle: Vancouver to Toronto [June 2010]

Dear Common: Vancouver

July Days [1830]

Dear Delacroix

Dear Common: Study for the rue Saint-Maur [1848]

La Commune [1871]

To the Barricades on rue de Tourtille [May 28, 1871]

RELUMINATIONS 1

RELUMINATIONS 2

RELUMINATIONS 3

Barricades Mystérieuses

Poetics Against the Enclosure of Dissent

Dear Common: Occupy

Come the Revolution

Dear Common: Politics Is Its Own World…

Almost Islands

Notes and Acknowledgements

About the Poet

Also by Stephen Collis

Copyright Information

The true drama of contemporary culture lies in the fact that it has become almost impossible to imagine social change that is not cataclysmic.

—Sven Lütticken

The poem distributes itself according to the necessity of subjects to begin, to begin speaking to anybody, simply because of the perception of continuous co-embodiment as the condition of language. This shaped speaking carries the breath of multiple temporalities into the present, not to protect or to sanctify the edifice of tradition, but to vulnerably figure historicity as an embodied stance, an address, the poem’s most important gift to politics.

—Lisa Robertson

screen-text

Dear Common

after Gerald Raunig’s Art and Revolution

I had thought this was

Outside the barricades

No street in time

But a space left

Uneven and cluttered

With broken ballot boxes

Like a poem with

Everything in it so

Nothing you write

Isn’t it and

Nothing you write is

But everywhere your

Hand over the page

Is shadowed by

Another hand taking

Up what you’ve written

Down and finding the

Spatiotemporal scale

At which it

Makes the most sense

It’s not a matter of

Imposing no

Guidelines

So long as they—

Tinkering with the

Art machine / the

Revolutionary machine—

Rise up from below

Evading the narratives

Of major ruptures

1789 / 1917

And—constantly moving

Permeable fluctuating—

A swarm of points of

Resistance not crushed

By apparatus—they

Find their own way

To the supper of

All history’s comers

I’m talking about a poem

And a revolution

Dear decaying discourse

The lacunae of every

Word we pitch

Brick by brick

Up against what

Contents and discontents

We are wanting

To wall out or

Wanting to wall in

One foot firm

In the reals

We have been

While the other

Steps off into the

Unimaginables we

Haven’t

Or brushing the dust off

An old familiar form—

Say sweet fringe

Of what I think

I’m saying—I can

Feel your pulse

Wherever I touch

The hand you hold out

To my place within

Or without this poem

What’s utterly common

What we set out

To accomplish together

Now that the entire world

Is one occupied square

Vibrating and red and

At the very edge of this page

Dear Common: Vancouver Alights

1. MILITANT PARTICULARISM

We are everywhere

in flight

annihilating space

one digital widget at a time

—is this what we

want it to be like?

Made a city

out of quotations

other voices

lived there too

I caught glimpses of them

in all the glass

where neon races

reflected the names

of bars and restaurants

that no longer exist

steering towards

uncertain markets

their boat in the street

a barricade we

could assemble ourselves

This was sort of

real / unreal

the city throbbing

gulped seajet years

primal terror

of spatial edges

where changeless

nothing pulses

against our fragile

real estate bubble

Thus we contrived power

electric sign illuminations

geographic billboard space

but that blast

of unevenness

snuffed our dwarfdom

left us rafts

a nude beach

glaring Hollywood

lights of Plutonian

descendants stretching night

to canvas crests

and gabled gateways

to imagined orients